and drink from no fountain
by sketchnurse
Summary: Never buy milk from shop girls anytime after the year twenty-four million. They have special training.


_28_

She survives the ride to the school, but only just. Her husband is overly fond of corners and never warns her about the brakes and of course she shouldn't have expected anything less from him. That doesn't mean he doesn't get a good smack upside the head when finally they arrive.

"It's not like we were going to be late," she hisses, but only half-heartedly. "I don't think Torchwood wants to pay to replace all of the signposts you nearly took out."

"You love it." he says, and he is so good, the things that he knows.

Tony doesn't seem to care that the sky is grey or that there are still four months left until summer hols. He has entirely too much energy, even for a boy of seven years and Jackie Tyler's genetics, but the Doctor doesn't seem to mind. Tony grins at her from atop her husband's shoulders and she takes a breath, preparing herself for the onslaught.

"Rose! Rose, can Paul come over? Only, his mum is making roast beef tonight and he hates roast beef and also he wants to see that thing the Doctor's building…"

She listens to Tony ramble on, her husband standing a tinge guiltily beside her, because everyone knows where Tony had gotten that tendency from. A little boy who must be Paul approaches cautiously (somehow Tony never manages to sell the Doctor to anyone, as enthusiastically as he describes him), and a woman follows behind, exasperated at her son's pace.

"–And then Amanda told me that I should have bodyguards because Dad's so famous and I told her all the bodyguards are scared of me because I'm a ninja and she didn't believe me so I pinched her and then Mrs. Chen got me in trouble but the principal wasn't in so I went for a walk instead and found a snail–"

"Your son's quite the handful," Paul's mother says to her, her face perhaps a little too understanding. Paul is hiding behind her legs; the Doctor's smile is too wide not to be disconcerting, but Rose loves it too much to tell him. "I'm sure it takes the two of you just to manage him."

"Oh, it does." her husband says, ruffling Tony's hair fondly. "He's not ours, though."

"I'm his sister." Rose explains.

It is still a plausible mistake to make.

_31_

On the date of her birth, it's unlikely she has lived a whole number multiple of 365 days since being born, but it's the only date that makes sense to celebrate.

It's cold, wherever they're going. She can feel her husband bouncing around her as they get closer and closer and she can't help but become infected with his energy; the combination has her shivering in harsh jolts, even as his hands on her shoulders try to steady.

"It's not much," he warns her. She can taste petrol and machine oil and arton particles and old sandwiches and names them as the shop in the basement of Torchwood's Warehouse 4.

He carefully unties the blindfold and suddenly there is not much light from bare light bulbs and entirely too many things on the floor and the ugliest ship she has ever seen in her life.

"Does it also travel in time?" she asks, almost too elated to react. Her hand finds his and he squeezes; she thumbs his pulse and it is racing, lub-lublub-dublub-dub.

"Oh yes, Rose Tyler. It also travels in time."

She thinks of the mortgage they've yet to take out and the promotion she's still considering and the baby they haven't made.

They don't return for five sets of 365.

_34_

It's twenty-four thousand centuries into their future, and her husband says they are out of milk. The planet is smote and still smoking and he thinks that maybe there will be a corner shop open.

There is. She's glad that he is not there to be smug about it.

There is a girl waiting bored at the till. She picks at her nails and rings up the purchase and doesn't bat an eye when Rose has to go through a stack of notes and cards and fat little coins to get the correct currency. Her face is dull and worn and doesn't seem to care that outside there are still riots, that the corner shop a few streets over is being looted. Perhaps the gun that all workers of her station carry is enough reassurance.

Rose is given a plastic bag for the milk and a scratch card for discounts and a second glance.

"Hang on," the girl says, just as Rose starts to leave. "You're not quite finished yet, are you? Serves you all right for going underground." She gets out from behind the counter like it's the most annoying thing she's done all day.

Rose doesn't understand why it is so necessary that she stand in the doorway for twenty seconds while the cashier puts her fingers on her temples.

She never will.

_36_

They lose their little ship in 1978 on Clom and she almost smacks her husband when he comes back to their room in the boarding house with one hand holding a vortex manipulator and the other trying in vain to cover his groin with a tea towel.

"Time Agents," he says, and she wonders what her mother would think. "They're all the same."

He passes out on the bed not long after and she cleans the scratches on his back and washes away sweat and dried fluids. As the self he had been before he had always been unblemished, a perfect canvas as befitted his facade. Now his scars are numerous and she loves every one of them. She could draw a map of the things he has done since becoming himself as this, just by connecting them, though a proper atlas would need more than the three dimensions she could draw it in; there are shining red marks just days old and toughened lines of skin from his first argument with a razor and all of them are collagen thrown haphazardly on top of wounds and there is nothing more human.

So inclined he would find no such cartography on her.

_38_

There is a man working at a kiosk who will not leave her mother alone.

"You don't want to lose that gorgeous face, Mrs. Tyler!" he is shouting at her, as they attempt to leave for the fifth time. "This is the best deal you can get, guaranteed."

"Honestly," Jackie mutters, as the man's supervisor comes over to apologize, "Wrinkle cream. As if I need wrinkle cream when your father brings home all of that alien nonsense. I don't look a day over fifty, now. And it's doing wonders for you–I'd swear you haven't aged a day since we got back!"

It must be doing wonders, because she's never touched any of it.

_41_

The counter in the bathroom is covered in grey hairs.

"Do I really need all of them?" The Doctor is whining and it is such a familiar sound that she doesn't register the possibility he might be upset about it. But the methodical way he has plucked out each and every grey hair, kept them in bundles and then spread them out, cannot signal the return of himself, unhinged, because had that been the case she knows, somehow, that he would have torn it all out and left himself a mess of scalp and blood.

He lines them all up and tries to tell her that some are a different grey than others, isn't that just amazing, but all she can see is the reflection of Rose Tyler in the mirror, hair a perfect honey brown.

"They're just going to grow back, you know." she tells him, gathering them up in a neat bunch and throwing them into the bin so quickly that she wonders if it had been an impulse with an origin deeper than the need for cleanliness. "No point in plucking them all out."

He stares at the bin like she's done the worst possible thing, like he needed all of those hairs, after all. Minutes pass before he moves his eyes away, and she catches too much light reflecting off of them. He tries to brighten up. He succeeds all too well, as the Doctor always does.

He takes a breath.

"Well I'm not going to dye them every few weeks, like you do. Too much work, if you ask me."

She'd have to. She hasn't dyed her hair since Bad Wolf Bay.

_44_

It's Tony's graduation from business school, and she and the Doctor have a little contest going.

"You may have the grace of good looks, wife, but I have the power of sheer charm." the Doctor whispers in her ear, both of them at the buffet table by mere chance. She has to agree with him on that one, but there's no way she'll give him the satisfaction of knowing.

Tony comes by with another stack of phone numbers and she smiles sweetly at her husband before sauntering off, a small group of Tony's friends following after her.

It does not cross one person's mind that Rose could be Tony's mother.

_49_

It's a gloriously rainy Saturday night.

The mattress is having arguments with the bed frame and the bed frame seems to be taking out its displeasure on the floor. There's no one around for miles, but she'll feel guilty about the scratches in the plaster, because this isn't their bedroom.

The Doctor lies prone beneath her, panting hard as she rides him. He grips her hips and shudders as she drives him faster; her thighs are like stone around his torso.

"Rose," he moans, like he always does, "Rose, Rose, Rose…"

They build themselves up together and as she falls he tumbles right after. She looks at his face as he comes and she giggles, because every time it is the most ridiculous thing and one of these days she is going to take a picture so he can see it for himself.

"You're going to be the death of me, Rose Tyler." he tells her, out of breath and dazed by the wave of contentment that has crashed over him.

She falls onto her husband to soak in the sweat of his body.

Her heart remains at a steadfast fifty beats per minute. Her blood pressure is 110/70.

_51_

"You know, you're going to have to start thinking about what you're going to do about menopause, Rose." her mother tells her. They're both at the spa getting pedicures, on a lazy, rainy Sunday. "They've got some great medications out there, but you have to start early. I've a doctor you could talk to, if you want."

There are cucumbers covering her mother's eyes.

Rose doesn't know if she can't see tears or laughter.

_54_

She doesn't like to go to liquor stores anymore.

Sometimes they ask for ID because it's store policy.

Sometimes they ask for ID because the drinking age is 25 in New Delhi.

One night the psychic paper disappears from the Doctor's pocket and that's what she uses when her mother wants more wine and she never looks to see what people had thought to believe.

_55_

"How long have you known?" she asks, when the third-year student from Cambridge finally leaves, his number tucked into her arse pocket. He leans against the wall of the pub, distinguished with his salt-and-pepper and the lines around his mouth. He watches her and the look in his eye is so familiar. She hasn't seen it since he'd both left and stayed with her.

"Do I have to pinpoint a day?"

He doesn't like endings.

"How long have you known?"

It hurts her like it must have hurt him, the thought of theirs being so far apart again.

_56_

The lights are off in their house; she sits on the toilet seat and holds her knees to her chest, refusing to give in to the urge to rock back and forth, lose herself in harmonic motion and forget that the world turns beneath her, without her. The darkness is like a blanket but it is too thin for the cold in her bones.

There is knocking at the door: three sets of five (never four, never four) before she hears the subtle creaks in the floor and his socks near sharing space with the atoms of the carpet. She whimpers as quietly as she can and perhaps the sound will not reach him; his hearing is not as good as it used to be.

If she looks down she will be able to see the blue lines like a spotlight shone onto them.

_57_

It takes her two weeks to lose the baby weight.

_59_

"Someone called you a goldigger at work today," the Doctor says lightly, the perfect tone for a boring Tuesday evening. She is rubbing cream into his back and it is clearly very pleasurable for him. He groans when she reaches a particularly large knot and she smiles in satisfaction.

"And what did you say?"

"Didn't say anything." She very much doubts this, and lets him know with a slow stop of her hands. "Okay, well, I said something, but it was with my right hook."

"Of course you did."

"There's going to be an inquiry." he tells her, like it's some upcoming summer storm. "Very exciting stuff. I almost thought this town was going to be boring."

Every place they've moved to has been. She's been very grateful.

They had lost England to her unchanging face.

_64_

There isn't much to do in dizzy American towns with names like Looneyville and Spread Eagle and Bald Knob. Her husband always manages to find some interesting place to work (or he makes them interesting, and hasn't that forced them to leave a dozen times) but she likes to stay home with Margaret because Margaret is much like Tony had been, in that she has entirely too much energy to be practical and Rose loves that they can keep up with each other.

Hookersville is near a lake that is nice for swimming and sometimes they take day trips over; they run on the sides of highways and through untouched country and settle down for picnics in the middle of West Virginia where nothing can touch them.

Except for Time, which washes over the trees and the grass and the rocks and the soil, washes over the birds and the spiders and Margaret Tyler, and carries them away.

It catches on Rose, snags on impossible burrs and ragged threads and she is a rock slowly pushed by a current in a river full of leaves.

_68_

In Detroit, she takes up kickboxing because she already knows judo and karate and aikido and a dozen other martial arts. Her instructor is constantly impressed with her form and there is pride she takes in the fact that there is no one in the studio who can take her down when she is finished learning all she can learn.

So it is not necessary for Tony to threaten the man in the bar who had not been able to take no for an answer, but he does, all the same.

"Lucky your old man is here to defend your honour, aren't you, gorgeous?" He is sweaty and not-yet balding and she wants to slice him into ribbons. She wants to tell him that she is more than twenty years older than her brother, that Tony Tyler likes his half-head of hair and hates the premature aging that Torchwood does to a man.

It is still a plausible mistake to make.

Detroit is lost to them, too.

_71_

She likes to run laps around a field in Canada while her husband jogs at half her speed; he is an impressive specimen for the age on his passport. They have lived forty-five years together and they still look May-December, not so far apart that everyone believes there is more than love at play. It is all still there, though, the things she does not have: the crow's feet and the stiff gait in the rain and the seven different pills each morning.

It could be more, though. He is lucky to look a well-preserved sixty and she knows it, lusts after it, accosts him in their bedroom while Margaret is asleep and drifts away to his tender ministrations. Sometimes he lies soft beside her but so much life lived has taught her that soft things can be gorgeous and he still knows how to kiss her, will always know how to kiss her. It is so much enough that she should be grateful and is but a person is not solely conscious thought.

Sometimes in the dead of the night he is tired and she is still awake and burns with fire he does not have in reserve. He was never of their world and even now does not live in all of it; if she is not in their bed and in some stranger's he does not know to feel angry about it.

She cries after he is civil to one of her young lovers. She hits him when he tells her that they are going to play golf together on the weekend. She holds him tight when he tells her that she is being ridiculous because it is so obvious that she loves him, so proven that it will never waver.

It could be that this is what she is most afraid of.

_75_

If she dreams of a river where her daughter fast approaches and her husband is so very far ahead, it is only because there is nothing to see anymore but the truth, and her mind is tired of the way she hides her eyes.

This does not stop her from doing so.

_78_

Parents should not bury their children.

This is not one of those funerals.

She holds her Jackie Tyler's coffin aloft and sees the damage in her husband's eyes; this is the first time that he has lost someone he has loved to linear time he has lived and it burns him.

She buries her mother.

She will bury Pete Tyler.

She will bury her husband.

She will bury her brother and her daughter and her grandchildren and their children and their children and their children and soon her time will be filled with burying her descendants and it will only make sense to make a home in the catacombs.

Not for the first time, she despises Bad Wolf, because she wonders how Jack Harkness a Universe away can stand the endless crash of happening when he is so stuck in place.

_83_

There is a white arch. There is a lake and a pathway and a groomsman in black.

"You didn't tell me you had such a gorgeous sister. Maybe I should have gone for her, instead!"

"Probably a good idea that you didn't introduce us, then." Margaret has an excuse to cry, because it is her wedding day.

A mother should also find such an occasion appropriate.

The Doctor finds her in the meadow two miles from the reception and he watches as she takes a knife to her waves of hair.

"A woman my age shouldn't be wearing it this long." she tells him, and it was supposed to have been funny. No one laughs until the storm rolls in and she spins around in the grass.

She is breathtaking.

He catches her as she leaps into his arms and she sees him wince in pain and feels his knees shake and she hates hates hates how acutely she notices.

_88_

Her grandson is born Alexander Jacob Tyler-Jeong, and he is beautiful.

She will never know him.

_94_

"Sometimes," she tells her husband, her Doctor, "I wish I could go back and find that girl and tell her how much she's ruined our life."

He doesn't need a wheelchair or a scooter but he insists that he looks more impressive with a cane and she has to agree, because with it he moves so much faster.

His passport says he is one hundred and two.

His mind says he is so many more centuries than that.

It does not matter, because all Rose can see ahead of her is Time spanning many more lives than a Time Lord has ever had.

_103_

Her daughter is forty-five that year.

The card is sent back, unopened.

Her husband's lap is strong enough to support her while she cries, but only just.

_112_

They break into a bank because it is fun and her husband has new legs and is itching to try them out. She tells him that she doesn't want to see him running because his lungs are not new but he doesn't listen to her and she has to stand with him while he leans against a wall to catch his breath.

"Don't wander off," she teases, as she climbs the ladder to the roof.

"Rule Number One," he says back with a smile, and when she returns he is writing on the wall, words in swirling circular script that she still cannot understand.

"What's it say?" she asks, resting her head gently on his shoulder. His eyes are so very old and know that she will see her own with such centuries in a mirror, one day.

"My wife has nicer tits than yours." he replies, with all seriousness, and she wonders that she hadn't figured it out before, that a more practical rule to follow was that falsehoods fell from the Doctor's lips with far too much familiarity.

She supposes she had been too busy already mourning him to notice.

It is possible that this moment is the first time since falling in love with him that she has stopped to see him in the present, completely.

He is so impossibly stunning that she thinks it good he had always been hidden by her fear of losing him.

_117_

"How long do you think you have?" Her question is a familiar one but she has only dared voice it now. His eyes are brown and they love her so well and he is half new parts, all old soul.

"I dunno. Medical science is pretty advanced, for a twenty-second century Earth. In a few years I could probably download myself into an android body, if I really wanted."

It is unspoken that he does not. There are not many who remember the Cybermen, but he is one of them.

_127_

There is now a wrinkle in the corner of her eye. She spends two days staring at it, prodding it, stretching it in hopes that it will multiply, that with enough provocation it will give up and spread across her face, burrow under her skin and crack her flesh until it shatters.

Her husband kisses it when he makes love to her that night, and she cries, and it is so familiar.

It is their last time together.

_131_

It is almost impossible not to get information in this brave new world. She does not have a link wired to her brain because she does not want one, but her Doctor is inevitably practical and so he gets the morning news and the things the mainframes hidden under miles of earth have computed are relevant to him.

Sometimes she forgets that they are his descendants, too.

He is too weak to carry coffins. She has strength enough for both of them. She wonders if even that will be enough for her, when he is gone.

There is a tear making a slow path down his face. It is stopped by hills and valleys and rough terrain.

When she cries there are no such obstacles. They slide past the faint lines on her face as if they are nothing. She supposes they are.

_134_

The oldest person on Earth is one hundred and seventy-eight years old.

Her husband could be one hundred and forty-three.

She is trying to coax honey out of a jar when he gets the news that the title has been passed on to Allison Davison-Morales Clarkson-Park, of Adelaide, Australia.

It is a bitter hope of hers they both know, that the title will belong one day to a man living in Paris, Ontario. It is such a small hope, such a small thing, such small years to help carry her through eternity, but she knows the power of time well lived.

Her husband had once only lived a few years with her.

_143_

Tony Tyler is old.

They almost don't let him into the country but the plague in England has finally passed and he is the most threatening man over ninety that the men in Customs have ever seen; Rose hugs him as tightly as she can at the zeppelin port and Tony Tyler wishes his jacket weren't water resistant because his sister's tears are sliding off of it and he wants to have something of her buried with him. She is almost a plastic woman, but her tears must decay. She'll cry later, though. That is near inevitable. Sometimes he thinks his sister is made of tears and desperations.

"Tony! How are you, old boy?" The Doctor is currently enamoured with hoverchairs and zips over to them at a speed far higher than regulation; he shouts apologies at the trio of young lovers he had almost knocked over in his enthusiasm.

"Not too bad. How about you, Doctor? Rose tells me you got anther valve replacement."

"Two, actually."

"That's nothing. I just spent two months in stasis getting my brain scanned for a full replacement. Got it installed a week ago."

Rose has always hated listening to men try to outdo each other.

Especially when she couldn't hope to match them.

_152_

The Doctor never wins the title.

She buries her husband on a Sunday because he had once told her that nothing happens on Sundays and she wants him to be the one exception, the only event competing in the category of significant Sunday things. The only thing she will ever think about when she hears the word Sunday.

Tony is a new man, and not a man at all, so they shoulder the burden together.

There is a grey hair in the sink when she brushes it after the service.

_176_

She could have another child. The Time Agent she has all but fallen in love with tries to convince her that to do so would not be so bad, but she takes him back to the fifty-first and reports him for not keeping up with his sterilization regimen.

A nice couple living on a planet with two suns and no moons know no greater joy than the sight of the small boy they are adopting.

_199_

She asks a very smart young man with an even smarter computer to find out how many descendants she has, in the year 2183.

There are one hundred and three.

She goes to one hundred and three funerals in four weeks.

When she is finished, she leaves Earth for the last time. There will be more funerals, onwards until the end of the Universe, but that is all the caring she can give to a family who refused to attend the funeral of Rose Tyler's husband, a man who had lived one hundred and twenty-six years without his box.

And because he had done that impossible thing for her, she thinks, she owes him no less than an eternity of great life.

She pretends that it will be possible.

_240_

She is now no stranger to dirty deeds and an underworld that will sell you a manipulator still on a dead Time Agent's wrist. Years living in a century not her own have changed her thinking and she no longer cringes at the stranger goings on that are considered normal.

"Can you get me his link ID or not?"

A couple fornicates in plain sight not two metres from her, and oh, she wishes.

Negotiations turn sour not an hour afterward and she carries a blaster on her hip and knives up many sleeves, because while Time only glances off of her she does not know how she would stand up to Death.

If she can, she has not thought of a worse thing to wake up to.

_401_

She has built a very large empire. She has forty-eight lovers and twelve mistresses and more money than has any business having a value and all of the time in the Universe to enjoy it.

So many people tell her that she has everything she could ever want.

Those are the only times she ever laughs.

_520_

They name her Destroyer of Worlds.

Her empire is dust, but only because she razed it herself.

She is not a cruel woman, because she understands in full the pain of one who must destroy their own people to save a Universe so very much larger. She must finally be wise because she would wish the knowledge on no person and never on her younger self, as much as true sympathy could have helped the Doctor.

Her Doctor had been the best man she'd ever known, but good men were not called the Oncoming Storm for nothing.

Good people become Destroyer of Worlds because in the end, good is so very relative and enough of it will turn on itself and guilt can make a person into more of a soldier than valour ever could.

Still, when asked, she thinks Valiant Child a suitable enough name for herself.

Only, to a great many people, Rose means deliverance.

_526_

She is told the fractures in the skin of the Universe have sealed themselves completely, out of nowhere.

"Like ceramic with a crack that won't leak." one woman says.

"Why did it happen? I thought the cracks couldn't be fixed because they were interwoven with their counterparts in the adjacent Universe? Similar to quantum entanglement?"

"As far as we can tell, the adjacent Universe has reformed itself. It's completely unblemished. No sign of any structural damage whatsoever. When that disappeared, the integrity of ours was repaired but only enough to make the fractures stable."

What they're saying doesn't make much sense so she shows them her credentials, ironically real on her sheet of liar's paper, and they explain to her in terms so precise she wants to weep.

While it should have the Doctor written all over it, one visualization of the mathematics shows something entirely different.

She has never hated Bad Wolf more than in that moment.

In that, she may finally have the secret to the Doctor's majesty.

_527_

It takes her a year to devise a way to get back to her Universe of so long ago.

This is a lie. It takes her a year to say goodbye to everyone she wishes to give a proper ending to.

She still does not return to Earth, but she knows a place her husband had been, with only nine years lived in this Universe, and she goes to him.

"I'm sorry," She had thought herself incapable of not breaking down upon seeing him, as yet untouched, and she knows herself very, very well. "I'm so sorry."

He holds her because he is not a man of forty-four and he knows how to say goodbye to people who have lived what he has not yet.

"You say hello to my idiot self, yeah?" He is not so uninfected with humanity that he does not cry, and she wipes the tears from his face with her perfect fingers. "And if he's not ginger, do take the piss. He deserves it."

"I will. And I'll give him a good Tyler slap, too."

"This isn't his fault."

"It's not yours, either." They both know that this is both true and untrue, but they are two who have lived through many contradictions and so it is truth enough.

"You will never tell me that you met me, Doctor." she whispers in his ear, and he nods, agrees, kisses the slender valley that has finally formed at the corner of her mouth.

"These are for you." she says, and presses into his hand a bundle of grey hairs.

_527_

He is easy enough to track down, at least by one with her knowledge, but the person outside of the TARDIS is a woman who is not he.

She is formidable enough, though, because her eyes narrow when she sees that Rose doesn't look right through the blue box parked on the side of the road.

They stare at each other for uncountable seconds. The moment of recognition collapses the stasis immediately, like a threshold met.

"Oh my God…" The woman takes a breath so heavy her chest moves and Rose watches the sunlight hit her mass of curls in an infinity of different angles.

"I take it you know who I am?" she asks, weakly. Something pricks her eyes. It is coal smoke from the factory down the road.

"You know, I wish his life wasn't one tragedy after another, but I don't know that he would survive that much happiness. His paranoia would probably drive him to insanity, and isn't that the most tragic thing of all?" She agrees. She agrees so much it hurts her.

Rose thinks back to a night in bed with her husband, him telling tales of the women he had travelled with, and tries to think of one who could match the halo of blond hair and the hips and the agelessness. She succeeds, and, oh, the backwards wife.

"Thank you." she whispers, and it is at that moment that a blue door opens.

_eleven-hundred and ten__  
_

"It wasn't your fault." Rose Tyler says, because there is a boy in his box, and his eyes are red when he looks at her.

It is still true and untrue.

Guilt makes such soldiers, and she knows that for her, he would raze the Universe to the ground.

Perhaps, if he lives a little longer, he will.


End file.
